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Saturday, August 5, 2017

Hey, HBO!

So, it was recently announced that HBO, and Game of Thrones show-runners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, would follow-up their spectacular run of medieval fantasy with an alternate history/reality series titled Confederate. No doubt inspired by Amazon’s successful The Man in the High Castle, based on Philip K. Dick’s novel about an Axis victory in World War II, Confederate will take place in a reality where the Confederate States of America won the Civil War. And, oh yeah, institutionalized slavery still exists. Of course, depending on how it is executed such a series could be a nuanced and insightful exploration of race relations in America. But many have wondered whether or not it will just be an exercise in white supremacists wish fulfillment. The fact that two of the project’s producers are African American (Nichelle Tramble Spellman, Malcolm Spellman) has not convinced detractors that the show is a good idea, and the hashtag #NoConfederate recently trended on Twitter during an airing of Game of Thrones.

But maybe HBO should just drop the whole Confederate idea (the South wins the Civil War has been done before) for something more original and interesting, an adaptation of Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2002 novel The Years of Rice and Salt. Robinson’s novel is also an alternate history, taking place in a world where the Black Death in 14th century Europe didn’t kill a mere third of the population but 99 percent, effectively removing European influence from history. The empires that rise and fall in Robinson’s world are Muslim and Chinese. Asians, Africans and the aboriginal peoples of the Americas and Australia still face colonialism, imperialism and war as they navigate a history that is different only in the details. There is even a 67-year World War, which alone would make for an interesting series. A much more interesting series than yet another rehash of the Civil War, and one that would avoid TV’s tendencies toward Eurocentrism.

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About This Blog

This blog is about narrative, the stories, both fiction and non-fiction, that we tell about our universe and ourselves. What is the genesis of these stories? How and why do we tell them? What do they mean? Topics will cover both the craft of storytelling, mostly regarding written forms such a novels, creative non-fiction and short stories, as well as analysis and critique of narratives through movie, television and book reviews.

About Me

Harboring Secrets

My science fiction short story Meta has been published as part of the Chesapeake Bay Writers Anniversary Anthology, Harboring Secrets: Tales and Reflections from The Chesapeake Bay Writers, available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Four Mile Circus

This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying . . . but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice . . . but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks . . . but nobody loved it.

Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination

In Alfred Bester's classic 1956 science fiction novel Tiger, Tiger (published for the less than literate masses of North America as The Stars My Destination) protagonist Gully Foyle masquerades as Jeffrey Fourmyle, wealthy buffon who owns and operates a traveling freak show known as the Four Mile Circus. The circus was a prop that allowed Foyle to travel among the social elite as he sought information on the Vorga, a ship that had left him for dead on the wreckage of the spaceship Nomad. Driven by revenge, Foyle would transcend his common origins to alter the course of human history.

The old year soured as pestilence poisoned the planets. The war gained momentum and grew from a distant affair of romantic raids and skirmishes in space to a holocaust in the making. It had become evident that the last of the World Wars was done and the first of the Solar Wars had begun....An ominous foreboding paralyzed every home from Baffin Island to the Falklands. The dying year was enlivened only by the advent of the Four Mile Circus.